Dylan Thomas | Critical Review by Peter Levi

Critical Review by Peter Levi

SOURCE: “Gruesome,” in Spectator, London, July 9, 1983, pp. 22–3.

In the following review of Thomas's Collected Stories, Levi decides that Thomas never matured as a prose writer.

Dylan Thomas might have been alive today. He never lived to be 40; he died 30 years ago—of playing a role it is impossible to sustain through middle age, and perhaps hard to sustain at all in the modern world. Indeed the very idea of Dylan Thomas shows how our world has altered. The seedily respectable, prewar, provincial territory of Cwmdonkin Drive is more utterly lost now than the old moods of Soho or the purity of rural Wales.

You might flick through the leaves of his Collected Stories in search of a certain meaty Welsh realism, or the prose version of a rural poem. But Dylan Thomas spent many...